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Best URIS Research Project Award 2025

The Best URIS Research Project Award aims to recognise and reward outstanding URIS research projects that have demonstrated remarkable research achievements. Each year, one Grand Award and up to two Merit Awards will be presented. Nominations for the Award are invited in October every year.

Nomination Eligibility

URIS research projects completed between 1 September 2024 and 31 August 2025 with an Outstanding rating in the completion report are eligible for nomination.  Projects with completion date beyond 31 August 2025 will be eligible for nomination in the following year. 

Selection Criteria

A selection panel has thoroughly assessed and evaluated the nominations for the Award. The selection criteria are as follows:

  • Achievements and impact of the URIS research project; and

  • Research outputs and prestigious awards resulting from the project.

Grand Award

Project Title: Design of a Broadband Highly Efficient and Linear Gallium Nitride Doherty Power Amplifier for Next-Generation Wireless Communication Systems

Supervised by Prof. LIU Ai-Qun and co-supervised by Dr ZHOU Xinyu | Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Next-generation communication systems require base stations that deliver strong and reliable signals with lower energy use. A core component of the base station transmitter is the power amplifier, which boosts a small radio signal to a high power level. When the output power varies, efficiency may decrease, and nonlinearity may increase, resulting in signal distortion and interference. To address these issues, a power amplifier was developed using wide-bandgap gallium nitride technology and the Doherty power amplifier architecture. Wide-bandgap gallium nitride devices offer higher breakdown voltages and higher power densities, which support compact, high-power designs. The Doherty architecture uses main and peaking amplifiers to share the load, sustaining higher efficiency over a wider output power range. A key innovation is a bias network optimisation that improves efficiency and linearity while maintaining gain. The resulting design demonstrates a highly efficient and linear power amplifier suitable for modern wireless infrastructure.

For next generation communication networks, a wide bandgap semiconductor based Doherty power amplifier as a key base station component improves energy efficiency and reduces distortion.
Yanze_Wang_Resize 540x600

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

WANG Yanze

Merit Award

Project Title: Research and Modelling of GNSS Signal Scattering Effects in Urban Areas

Supervised by Prof. HSU Li-ta and co-supervised by Prof. ZHANG Guohao | Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering

Understanding how Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals behave in different environments is crucial for improving positioning accuracy in navigation-related applications. However, while the scattering effects introduced by urban buildings have been well studied in the literature, signal propagation through vegetation remains less understood. In this project, GNSS positioning performance under vegetation was comprehensively investigated through large-scale experiments conducted in both Hong Kong and France. The analysis revealed that signal propagation through vegetation differs significantly from propagation around buildings, indicating that the conventional model in urban areas do not accurately describe signal behavior in vegetated environments. Moreover, a strong dependency of vegetation-induced signal degradation on satellite elevation angle was identified, leading to the development of a novel weighting model specifically designed to account for vegetation effects. As a result, enhanced positioning accuracy in vegetated environments was achieved, offering valuable benefits for location-based services particularly in heavily forested areas.

This project systematically modeled GNSS signal degradation in urban vegetated environments, which facilitates the development of more reliable navigation systems.
Jiayi LouiseZHOUResize 540x600

Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering

ZHOU Jiayi

Merit Award

Project Title: Data-Driven Optimization and Automated Design for High-Efficiency Class-F Power Amplifiers

Supervised by Prof. LIU Ai-Qun and co-supervised by Dr ZHOU Xinyu | Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

With the rapid advancement of 5G/6G wireless communication technologies, RF front-end circuits face demanding performance requirements and stringent size constraints. Core components such as power amplifiers must achieve high efficiency, wide bandwidth, and low loss within limited space. Conventional design methods rely on fixed geometric structures, resulting in low spatial efficiency, while time-consuming electromagnetic simulations make it difficult to obtain optimal solutions. This research proposes a design methodology that discretizes circuit layouts into a pixelated design space, with an AI-based surrogate model to replace traditional simulations, significantly accelerating inverse design while improving spatial utilization and performance. A key innovation is the first application of Transformer architecture to electromagnetic surrogate modeling, introducing the Frequency-Query mechanism to efficiently predict dense frequency responses with reduced training data. The final outcomes include a high-efficiency power amplifier and an ultra-compact bandpass filter, demonstrating the potential for next-generation wireless systems.

An AI-driven pixelated inverse design approach enables compact and high-performance RF circuits for next-generation wireless communication systems.
Jingyun_Bi_Resize 540x600 v4

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

BI Jingyun

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